


Silent Night

by Merixcil



Series: Advent Fics 2018 [16]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, bodily autonomy issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-16
Updated: 2018-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25315297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merixcil/pseuds/Merixcil
Summary: Rey explores Dantooine
Relationships: Rey & Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Advent Fics 2018 [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824643
Kudos: 1





	Silent Night

**Author's Note:**

> Set post-TLJ in my person AU in which Ben is almost immediately ousted as Supreme Leader and goes into hiding

There’s not much left of Dantooine, the millennia of wars fought around it and within it have hollowed out the planet like no amount of mining ever could. In the planet’s winter, snow dusts the rolling green hills down to a uniform white and all character is drained from the place. Rey watches the sun set from the top of the ruins that she’s starting to think were an old Jedi training academy, if the memories she’s picking up from the disused, hallowed halls are anything to go by. 

Used to be that you could mine Kaiber here, up until around forty years ago when the Empire plundered everything that they could find in their efforts to strangle the last shreds of free will awake in the Galaxy. She only knows this because Leia told her, eking out the history of the former Republic and everything that happened around it like passing on the story is going to give it life if she can retell it with enough passion. 

The Resistance is holed up in one of the larger abandoned mine shafts, some three miles North of here. Finn had caught Rey on her way out and asked if she needed company, but she had felt how much he hated the snow, caught up as it is with his memories of Stormtrooper training on Hoth, and with Starkiller Base. 

She had smiled. “I just need to clear my head. I’ll be fine.”

“Be safe. Make sure you take a comm unit with you.” Finn had squeezed her shoulder. Rey’s still getting used to the idea that someone will miss her when she’s gone. 

The snow is violet in the fading light. The distant hills are covered in a low cover of fog that promises a cold night ahead. Not for the Resistance, of course. They’ll be tucked up tight around a central fire, plotting small scale espionage and damage to as much infrastructure as they can get their hands on. 

Rey scans the landscape like she once scanned the dunes of Jakku, hyper sensitive to any movement out amongst the hills. Her eyes fall on a spot a couple of miles south east and she feels a tug at the base of her spine strong enough to knock her off balance. 

Far away, on a tropical planet that glows so bright it’s impossible to trick yourself into believing its night even though it lacks a sun of any kind, Kylo Ren awakes. “What was that?”

Rey closes her eyes and breathes out long and hard through her nostrils. She can feel the soft loam of the forest beneath her hands, the slippery soft edges of the material he cut his cape from, folded over to use as a pillow. 

When her eyes fall open, she’s still looking to the south east, and the tug becomes an ache, a longing, a desperate passion that she cannot tame. It crawls up her spine to her stomach, then settles somewhere around her heart. 

Ben’s hands shake, pawing at his chest, trying to cut the feeling free. “Rey!”

 _I know._ She tells him. She tries not to talk to him, but it’s hard. Harder than ever on this planet, where their shared history in the Force seems to rise to a fever pitch and she’s no longer sure if it’s calling out to her or to him. 

Rey could have told Finn all about it on her way out of the shaft. Don’t worry about me, I’m never entirely alone. 

Her chest rises and falls at the same time as Ben’s, both of them breathing hard like they’ve just run a mile. He sends her the heat of his planet, she sends him the chill of Dantooine. He’s stripped down to his undershirt and a pair of short trousers, she’s wrapped in Bantha hide to keep from freezing. 

Rey stands and starts to make her way down the ruins of the former training academy. Her feet find the steadiest places to rest on instinct, and with her staff on hand to guide her it’s impossible for her to fall. By the time she hits level ground, the hill to the south east is lost from her line of sight, but the longing is still there. She sets off without pausing to think about it, letting her feet drag her forward. 

“What are you doing?” Ben snaps. He reaches out like he’s trying to physically tug Rey to a standstill but she becomes liquid and slips through the phantom pressure of his hands. “Rey!”

She ignores him. He is easier ignored in most instances, too used to getting everything he wants or having to fight tooth and nail for it. He’s learning, in painfully slow measures, but his entitlement is still quick to turn to anger. 

“It could be a trap!” He hisses. “Rey, listen to me. You can’t just-”

Rey holds up an open palm, curling it neatly into a fist. Ben splutters and clutches at his throat as his voice cuts out. Here and there. He stares her down with angry eyes that she feels more than sees, alarmed that she can do something that requires so much energy when he never took the time to teach her. 

His principal failing has always been his assumption that she can’t teach herself. 

It’s probably a Dark technique, but Rey doesn’t care to see the difference as she marches the two of them through the dips and valleys of the Dantooine hills. She doesn’t have to pause to think about direction, she doesn’t have to climb a hill to be sure she’s staying on course, she knows she is taking the route she was meant for. 

Ben fights the block on his vocal chords, but he’s unable to suss out the shape of the energy Rey holds over him. By the time he decides to surrender he’s on his feet, his hand at his hip, reaching for his lightsabre, as if there’s anything he could do from so far away. 

When Rey arrives at the bottom of the hill that’s been calling her, the sky is dark overhead, just one of the planet’s twin moons hanging listless in the sky. None of the stars are familiar here, on the wrong side of the planet for her to use any of her meager understanding of the cosmos to try to pick out her place within it. Below her feet the light dusting of snow crunches and creaks, and her heart feels like it might burst. 

There’s a cave, perhaps the begining of mine shaft so old that it’s no longer marked on the old Rebellion maps of Dantooine, but perhaps just a cave. Despite the dark, Rey can clearly see where the overhead shelter has stopped the snow, a neat line in the sand between the white and the brown. 

Deep dark brown, very different from anything on Jakku. Rey feels Ben’s protest as a moment of indecision, then she lets herself fall with the Force, as she has always done, and heads into the cave. 

As soon as she’s inside, she’s sure she was right to follow her gut. It’s too dark to see, so she reaches out with the Force to guide her around the stalagmites. Like Luke did with the Death Star, and maybe if he taught her anything, he taught her this. Within the cave, the silence is perfect and absolute, wrapping her in its thick embrace till she doesn’t have to think about anything but putting one foot in front of the other. 

Far away on his tropical planet, Kylo Ren’s pulse slows. He breathes deep. He’s used to being drowned in the Force, and yet completely unfamiliar with the feel of this place. Rey blinks and she swears that if it weren’t so dark she would be able to see him at her side. She can practically feel his warmth, animal and persistent and she tries to gravitate towards it on impulse. 

They move until the only passage ahead becomes too small for a human to move through, not that Rey isn’t down to try. She’s small, she’s fast, she grew up squeezing into spaces that weren’t meant to take her. But she stops, because her heart tells her to, her spine has found its calling. 

_What’s that?_ Ben thinks, when Rey’s hands brush the back wall of the cave and find something that is all clean lines and open surfaces in amongst the jagged rock. 

Her fingers dig into the space around it, feeling for the seam. She moves further and finds its brother sat next to it. They should both be embedded in the rock so deep that only a vibro-tool would shift them, but with the most gentle coaxing of her fingers and the Force they come free, dropping into the palm of her hand. 

They feel like the funny little diamond shaped water packs the Resistance uses when travelling through deep space. When they brush against one another, they click. 

_Kaiber._ Rey drops the two of them into her pocket before Ben can get too much of a feel for them. _Our kaiber._

_What colour?_

_It doesn’t matter._ Her thoughts barely feel like tangible meaning, just the vague suggestion of feelings pushing back and forth between the two of them in the dark. It doesn’t matter a bit what colour the crystals are, not if he won’t turn. 

Rey’s hand brushes the wall of the cave again, just checking to be sure she hasn’t missed anything, but the tug is gone from her gut and from her feet and all that’s left is a deep seated feeling of peace. This place remembers the young Jedi who came here to find the pieces for their lightsabres, it remembers the tears and the fear and the joy. It remembers in feelings and in colour, it remembers in light and sound. 

And in the present it is dark and silent. Rey sits herself down on the floor and lets it all wash over her and into her. If she’s lucky, some small part of this might flow into Kylo Ren. What he chooses to do with it is another matter entirely. 

**Author's Note:**

> This work was originally posted as part of a multi chaptered 'advent fics' fic that I'm trying to split up. If you think you've read it before, you probably have
> 
> Comments on the previous posting of this fic (just ask if you want me to remove yours) include:
> 
> >SorceressSupreme: Oooooh I love so much the idea of Rey finding hers and Ben's crystals 😍😍


End file.
